The History of Short Films

Short films could defined as 40 minutes or less motion picture, anyone can create a short
film. Ranging to professionals to amateurs, exploring the film world and telling a narrative in
a short amount of time, allowing enough drama to take place. Sometimes a short film
doesn’t make a profit and is made as either a starting point for filmmakers or just to
improve and create better productions. Though depending on what sort of production
you’re making, short films tend not to use too much money and time. As experimental and
fantasy were seen as quite popular near the beginning of cinematic history.

‘A Trip to the Moon’ created by Georges Melies, who was a French Producer and created
around 400 films between 1899 to 1912, his films were full of fantasy, it was very useful that
he was a professional magician and already had this creative mindset that allowed him to
create weird and wonderful productions that would change people’s perspectives on
motion pictures. ‘A Trip to the Moon’ was shown in 1902, a 12-minute film full of drama and
action, showing a group of men (though they looked as if they were dressed as magicians)
discussing about travelling to the moon, when they do eventually land on the moon, they
run into aliens and a mad chase occurs, where they ‘hit’ the aliens which makes them
disappear before they made their way back onto their ship to go back to Earth. Since films
before the 1920s were silent, Melies had to find ways to describe the story to the audience
by using actor and stage movement, by having his actors move in dramatic motions and
then the sets being moved across probably by behind the stage crew (the settings were
made and painted by hand) sometimes actors would also dress as objects, using their facial
expressions to describe how this object would be feeling. For example, actors are dressed as
the stars and other planets, watching and talking amongst each other about the people who
have landed on the moon. The film is very artistic, since there wasn’t advance technology,
the setting would be created by hand, time was really put into the set. The Lumiere Brothers
were huge inspirations to Melies, as the inventors of the ‘Cinematographe’. Georges Melies
had discovered the basic camera tricks, which included stop motion, slow motion, dissolve,
fade out, superimposition and double exposure, though he had yet to actually move the
camera to close-ups or longer shots, not being able to capture someone’s emotion by
closing up on them. That’s why throughout ‘A Trip to the Moon’ the shots are all one wide
shot.

Now looking into book research, ‘Making Short Films’, George Melies and Lumiere Brothers
would struggle creating a production that was completely silent so they began mastering
techniques such as juxtaposition, parallel action, framing, lighting, camera angles, focus,
filters, montage and camera movement, though it was only the basics and throughout the
years filmmakers have taken these techniques and making them more obvious, but they did
have to start from somewhere. Their content would be so simple, since it was such a new
thing, they experimented with everyday life’s (especially the Lumiere Brothers) that
anything they filmed would be exciting for an audience, since they’ve never seen
photography captured and turned into movement. In 1895, the sort of motion picture short
films would normal be as simple as a train pulling up to a station or even workers flooding
from factory gates.
The ‘Kinetoscope’ created by Thomas Edison, way before the Lumiere Brothers’s
‘Cinemagraphe’. A film strip would rapidly pass between the lens, the film strip would be
extremely long, so the design of the ‘Kinetoscope’ was large. An electric light bulb was also
placed so you can actually see the image. It was a one viewer at a time, you’d have to peer
through a peephole to watch the short film. This was a new beginning and would inspire
later filmmakers to interpret the design and make the sort of cinema we have now. Since
Thomas Edison was the inventor of the light bulb, he was already a genius and used his
mind to create the first motion picture. It had developed a lot since, it wasn’t until 1953
when the introduction of the ‘Cinemascope’ was created that widescreen cinema was used
extensively. The ‘Cinemascope’ was much like a projector, created by a French Physicist,
Henri Chretien. The Lumiere Brothers ‘Cinematographe’ was inspired when they were
young, as their father had gone and seen Thomas Edison’s ‘Kinetoscope’ in Paris, they were
fascinated with the motion picture and was a helping step for them to create their own
verison.

The codes we use nowadays, that have been developed from the early films into simple
codes to follow. The Enigma code, this is when you’d structure your production so that it’s
interesting to the audience, you do this by choosing a genre much like a thriller that is
mysterious, puzzles the audience and allows them to interpret the narrative into their own
meaning. The Connotative Code is when you use meaning using a character or setting, that
the character is key to the narrative by the emotions they present or even how they’re
dress, sometimes making it obvious in what their role is. The Action code is when a little or a
lot of action patterns is placed within a narrative that creates tense and making it more
exciting for the audience than just one continuous scene. It would disturb the smooth
running of the narrative and create a ‘bump’ within the storyline. You need this action to
show the audience one thing to be able to reveal something else, something new.
I only looked at the trailer of ‘Rebecca’ a film by Alfred Hitchcock, within this trailer Enigma
and Connotative code is used, a constant going back to how good the motion picture is and
is something the audience have never experienced. They use Enigma by not revealing too
much about the production and only using dramatic scenes to confuse the audience and
allows them to put the pieces together or gives them a reason to really want to see it. The
use of saying a romance and mystery, letting us know that this could be a failed romance
and all could end bad. The Connotative is having certain people and props shown either
repeatedly or highlighted, to show that this is very important within the narrative and
maybe that the audience shouldn’t forget.
Then looking into Continuity Editing, that was changed as people became more
knowledgeable when creating a film. Rather than making something quite rhythmic and
would hide the construction from the audience, more rules were added since, so filmmakers
realised that different camera angles were very much important, there needs to be more
close-ups to see more emotions from actors and fewer medium shots as they can become
boring for a long period of time.

Moving back to the change of technology, obviously the start of Thomas Edison’s
‘Kinetoscope’, which had then influenced other inventors to take the concept of the
‘Kinetoscope’. The ‘Cinemascope’ had a special lens that would be able to create a wider
picture, the proportions weren’t as distorted either. The projector was the next set in the
cinematic history, taking how the ‘Cinemascope’ worked, using the same bit of film but
instead the projector (nowadays) would usually involve some sort of memory card to allow
a photo or film to be shown at a larger scale, since then the projector has changed not only
in design but in size as technology has improved so much, allowing lots of information onto
a smaller memory.
But even the little things we use in our day to day lives can be useful to any professional or
uprising filmmaker. Our iPhones, personally for some it’s best to avoid using an iPhone to
film a whole production as it’s best to use cameras since the iPhone would automatically
focus and change the lighting for the filmmaker whilst with a camera it’s done much more
manually. Filmmaker Steven Soderbergh had filmed his movie (1 hour and 38 minutes)
‘Unsane’ all on his iPhone, using a iPhone stabiliser to keep the scenes running smoothly as
it attached to him. But we’ve also become move advance with stabilising, from having a
‘Tracking Rail’ to now having ‘Stedicam’ which may not be brand new now but is still a great
piece of equipment that makes a scene a whole lot better. For example it was used in
‘Rocky’ when actor Sylvester Stallone was running up the ‘Philadelphia Steps’ in one of the
most famous scenes in cinema, all filmed using a ‘stedicam’ to make sure that there wasn’t
any shakiness and allowed the camera operator to follow the character much more easily as
the equipment is actually strapped on using a harness. That nowadays our cameras allow us
to have more footage then times before as it is now kept in memory cards and internal
storage, this has moved us on from tapes, CDs and DVDs, especially from the early ‘cameras’
like the kinetoscope.

Not only did I look at the development of cameras (or how a motion picture was presented)
but also how editing has changed. Orson Welles, the writer, director and producer of films
like ‘Citizen Kane’, was fascinated with editing and enjoyed how it could really change a
scene just by colour correcting or cutting as scene making it look as if it was fasted paced.
Though he wasn’t the first filmmaker to find editing very interesting, it goes all the way back
to Georges Melies, who believed that reality was really dull and by simple editing it could
really change a production as a whole. It would manipulate an audience into believing
something is real. He wanted to explore with these mediums, he thought editing as
something magical, tricking the audience into believing something was exciting and
wonderful, despite not being realistic.
We also have editing techniques so out of this world that it actually can trick the eye, this is
CGI (computer-generated imagery) making us think something is real but is actually created
using art and software, this is why superhero films are much more ‘amazing’ as they can
create whole new characters who aren’t even there or locations that are impossible to get
too, not only magical to children but also adults.

I watched ‘The Great Train Robbery’ and ‘Un Chien Andalou’, seeing how different the
productions are from one another. ‘The Great Train Robbery’ was produced by Edwin S
Porter in 1903, a very early production. The film is silent throughout, allowing overdramatic
movement to take over so the audience have more of an understanding on what’s going.
For example there’s a scene where an extra is shot, he throws himself into the air before
landing harshly, emphasising the fact he’s just be shot. Porter also used props and costumes
to help the audience understand what kind of characters are in the film, the robbers looks
as if they’re cowboys, wearing large hats, having holsters for their guns. There is a scene
where a robber throws someone off a train, a fake body prop is used, it would obviously had
fooled the audience in 1903, giving them a fright and action within a slow scene (3:12). You
also see an early ‘green screen’, where a large window is shown to the side, showing a train
moving by, obviously the train wasn’t actually right outside this window since the beginning
scene was in an inside set. This action short film is very much different to ‘Un Chien
Andalou’, this was more of an experimental film. The film was based on a dream the writers
Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali had, where one of them had a dream about ants crawling out
of his hand and then another where his eyeball was sliced open with a barbers blade. ‘Un
Chien Andalou’ involved a lot more camera angles than Porter’s film, which stayed in a wide
shot throughout to show the whole scene, Bunuel focused more on getting people’s
emotion and also showing the audience that they must remember certain props as we see it
repeated and close-up. For example the patterned box, shown throughout in a vary of
places. If I had understood the film better than I would have an idea on what’s the
importance of it but Bunuel focused on having a visual film rather than worrying about the
narrative, much more artistic. We do see the ants crawling out the man’s hand, much like
the dream and the cutting of the eye happens right at the start, Bunuel even starred in his
own production, as the one to cut open the eye, it never really making sense to the
narrative.
Luis Bunuel was a Spanish filmmaker, though ‘Un Chien Andalou’ was filmed in Paris with
French actors. He was the figure of surrealism, and had a very different mind to other past
filmmakers, his films using were preoccupied with themes of ‘cruelty, eroticism and
religious mania’ overall meant his films would be very sexual, could be seen as horrific at
times and since he was an atheist, his believes were very much different to others. Which
led him to create his sequel to ‘Un Chien Andalou’, which was called ‘L’Age d’or’ which was
funded by investors Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles since his first film was such a ‘hit’.
‘L’Age d’or’ was banned since it was heavy sexual with religious references, angering
audiences.

Overall, throughout the years film has developed and changed but without the early
creations of the ‘Kinetoscope’ and ‘Cinematographe’ then no of it would have been
possible. Each filmmaker had inspired the next, to create the film industry we have now.
From going to simple action like ‘The Great Train Robbery’ to experimental and out of this
world films like ‘Un Chien Andalou’ and even ‘A Trip to the Moon’, developing on changing
of camera angles, deciding that a production would look better if the camera was moved
around more and that getting the same shot of a scene but in different angles is a lot more
exciting than keeping the same wide shot throughout just because you want to show all
action. That filmmakers are very creative and are somewhat geniuses, creating
entertainment for over 100 years.